a taste o'henry

[calbert at hslboxmaster.com]

"It looked like a good thing: but wait till I tell you. We were down 
South, in Alabama--Bill Driscoll and myself-when this kidnapping 
idea struck us. It was, as Bill afterward expressed it, 'during a 
moment of temporary mental apparition'; but we didn't find that out 
till later.

There was a town down there, as flat as a flannel-cake, and called 
Summit, of course. It contained inhabitants of as undeleterious and 
self-satisfied a class of peasantry as ever clustered around a 
Maypole.

Bill and me had a joint capital of about six hundred dollars, and we 
needed just two thousand dollars more to pull off a fraudulent town-
lot scheme in Western Illinois with. We talked it over on the front 
steps of the hotel. Philoprogenitiveness, says we, is strong in semi-
rural communities therefore, and for other reasons, a kidnapping 
project ought to do better there than in the radius of newspapers 
that send reporters out in plain clothes to stir up talk about such 
things. We knew that Summit couldn't get after us with anything 
stronger than constables and, maybe, some lackadaisical 
bloodhounds and a diatribe or two in the Weekly Farmers' Budget. 
So, it looked good.

We selected for our victim the only child of a prominent citizen 
named Ebenezer Dorset. The father was respectable and tight, a 
mortgage fancier and a stern, upright collection-plate passer and 
forecloser. The kid was a boy of ten, with bas-relief freckles, and 
hair the colour of the cover of the magazine you buy at the news-
stand when you want to catch a train. Bill and me figured that 
Ebenezer would melt down for a ransom of two thousand dollars to 
a cent. But wait till I tell you.....

http://eserver.org/fiction/the-ransom-of-red-chief.html

Is this what anyone recalls from high school?

love,
cfa